About Me

I'm a semi-retired professional man, living in the Midwestern United States. This blog is a personal blog and is not directly connected with my professional practice (although I may draw upon my professional experiences, as well as my personal experiences, in writing my blog posts). This is a place for personal, not professional, opinions.

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09/05/2011

What Almost Inevitably Consists

As I exited the hooch, the kid came around the corner, his AK-47 at port arms. Before hecould raise it, I shot him three times: chest, neck, and right under the bridge of the nose. There was a lot of blood spray, and out of the red mist there emerged the flickering staccato of muzzle flashes from the tree line just beyond the edge of the village. But the whizz, zing, and hiss of rounds passing close by my head as they sought me was drowned out by the hammering at my side of Ong’s Remington 870 fully auto shotgun that a Navy SEAL had “gifted” him with. If he hadn’t been such a short shit, the spent shell casings would have pinged off the side of my head instead of my shoulder. I added a series of double-taps from my M-16 to his thunder, and watched several of the flashes flicker out.

Minh’s voice suddenly screamed behind us, “Go!” I turned and went as fast as my twenty-two year-old legs could carry me. I heard two more blasts from Ong’s shotgun, then silence as he followed. We were the hunters turned hunted, and we ran as if our lives depended upon our speed, which, in fact, they did.

I know I killed the kid, and I’m fairly certain I killed other men that night. I wish I could say that the thought still haunts me, but it doesn’t. I wish I could say that, as a Christian, I believe that I must repent for having taken those lives that night nearly 40 years ago. I cannot.

Friends I admire, even love, including author Heather King, take a stand that violence is never justified, that there is no such phenomenon as a “just war.” Heather went so far as to allege that those of us who support the Church’s teaching on a “just war” are cowards who send others to die while we wrap ourselves in safe theory far from the killing fields. According to Heather:

What I find interesting is that our idea of rising up against tyranny and wiping out Hitler almost inevitably consists of drafting or recruiting 18-year-old boys (and now girls) who tend to be relatively poor, relatively uneducated, and relatively without a whole lot of career choices to put on a uniform, learn how to maim and kill, go far away from home, and if they’re not maimed or killed themselves, return to sustain life-long physical, psychic, emotional and/or spiritual scars. Why not go over and present ourselves to Hitler?—which is essentially what St. Maximilian Kolbe did. Christianity certainly does not say we don’t rise up against tyranny: it says we rise up ourselves, though--not that we offer proxies.

The problem with Heather’s proposition is that over 4 million American men voluntarily enlisted in the armed forces in WW II to fight the Hun and the yellow peril. My father was one of them, typical of them, and he was not relatively uneducated, poor, or without career choices. In fact, he’d completed a semester of pre-med studies when he dropped out of college to enlist. Thus, her criticism of “just war” supporters as being "let-the-other-guy-shoulder-the-load" types founders before it an even leaves the harbor.

I’m often struck by the fact that many of the critics of the just war doctrine are those with the best of intentions but are also those with the least life experience. Perpetual graduate students and cloistered aesthetes sometimes lack the experience of what it’s like to make a stand when the consequences are not hypothetical, an experience that might better inform their opinions of those of us who know that, sometimes, the world exists not in black and white, but in various shades of grey. When the barbarian breaches the wall and raises an axe to slay your child, you sometimes forget the express wording of the Sermon on the Mount and act as a man acts.

That said, it seems to me that this is an issue (the use of violence to oppose evil in this world) on which a person should not err. It seems to me that deciding incorrectly has eternal consequences. It seems to me that the pacifist stands as much chance of burning in hell if he or she is wrong as does the soldier who raises the rifle and fires a round that hits home.

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"That said, it seems to me that this is an issue (the use of violence to oppose evil in this world) on which a person should not err. It seems to me that deciding incorrectly has eternal consequences. It seems to me that the pacifist stands as much chance of burning in hell if he or she is wrong as does the soldier who raises the rifle and fires a round that hits home."

Error can certainly lead to sin - ask Boromir - but there mere incorrect decision to use or not use violence in this world doesn't, in my opinion, direct the soul one way or another. Perhaps I say this because I frankly don't know the answer to this problem, and while I lean toward the pacifist position on philosophically technical grounds, I can't deny the heroism and virtue of the soldier. Hell, my favorite literary archetype is the saintly badass.

One of the spiritual dangers of both positions is the same: a failure to take responsibility. Both killing and the refusal to kill have temporal consequences (at least), and both he who kills and he who refuses to kill bear responsibility for what they do or don't do and, to an extent, for the consequences. Neither the pacifist nor the soldier should be dead to the lives lost from their actions. They should both live with what they've done. And remember. Seems to me that is exactly what the soldier you quote is doing.